Organising international conferences is a formative experience.

The worldwide impact of climate change, the energy crisis and the environmental crisis on sustainable natural resource use is increasingly recognized. What unites these themes is that they are transboundary, strongly interrelated, affect Southern regions disproportionately, and all have a significant water dimension. In such a context, regionally shared water management problems provide new windows of opportunities for regional collaborative approaches to water education in the South.

This international conference and workshop sets out to establish a creative dialogue between three Southern-based water education networks: from Southern and Eastern Africa, South Asia and South America (the Andes). These networks have emerged in the wake of a growing demand for regionally relevant knowledge and expertise on Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM). Through such a dialogue, these regional networks will share valuable experiences and key lessons, both in terms of how to educate water professionals that will be able to deal with today’s and tomorrow’s water challenges, and in terms of effective ways to understand and confront such water challenges.